Across the Starways: A Space Odyssey

She made her way with her bag to the seedy underbelly of the capital city. It was in with this dangerous crowd of rejects, derelicts, and defectives that she found her mark. A Grey alien with an ugly look on his gawky face. She hated the sight of him as it brought back too many bad memories. She drew a heavy breath of courage and went forward into the fray, guarded against pickpockets, pokes, thieves, and cut-throats she made her way to the table with this unlucky fellow. He soon found a weapon at his back. “Come with me if you want to live.” She said pretty positive that she would have to kill him to prove she was serious to his shipmates. He stood, put his hands up, and started walking. He was expecting someone to start a fight and that to save him. He forgot his blaster in his other pocket today and was already half-drunk. They carried on outside and she said, “Where is your ship?” He laughed, “You are too late, I just lost it in a bad bet.” Flyla was not amused. “Which Ship?!” She repeated in agitation. He stumbled to and fro for half an hour boiling her blood over and over again, but she kept her patience and nerves. Then he fell on top of the hood of a craft, somewhat dented and in need of some gentle love and tender care to love it back to life. He started laughing. “Here it is. I don’t know why. What you think you gonna do? Steal it? You can’t fly it.” He fell down laughing. “Thank you.” She said and shot him once eliminating him. “Just watch me try.” It was a circular craft with a bio-lock. So, she took his corpse and unlocked the ship. Then left him behind and hitched a ride to the other side of the star ocean. It required a telepath to drive. She was happy to oblige. Set destination and push button. Then the big reveal. Familiar stars greeted her eyes. She was floating above her home world. Lilly. There was a star base, or space station floating above the planet along with three moons. She gingerly approached the star base. The problem was that she could not find any place to land the ship. She began to hear people over the radio in the craft. Except that she could not understand what they were saying. The conversations she could understand were directed at the dead man. Murder made her sad, but it was a cruel world. She decided that she had no choice but to go planet-side. She had no idea how much fuel this craft had left powering it. She went down to the planet’s surface and found the first metropolitan area covered in people and landed on a street, stopping traffic for terrestrial vehicles. She waited in the ship until a crowd began to gather. Then she saw people in uniforms approaching. She got out of the small craft with her travel bag and approached them back. She dropped her bag and started putting her hands up when she was met with the muzzles of weapons.